The Cider House Rules

This chapter traces the origins of Dr. Wilbur Larch. Larch was brought up in Portland, Maine by a strict, abstinent mother and a cynical, alcoholic father. His mother worked for the state governor, who was a temperance promoter and enforcer, and the family lived in their house. His father was a porter and a former shipyard worker. As a boy, Larch—who did not want to resemble either of his parents—took refuge in school and books. He went to Bowdoin College as an undergraduate and then to Harvard Medical School.

As a graduation gift between Bowdoin and Harvard, Larch’s father buys him a night with a Portland sex worker. The following morning, Larch discovers that the sex worker has a teenaged daughter, who propositions Larch. Still later, he encounters them both on the train from Portland to Boston; he gives the older woman his seat on the train. The sexual encounter gives him gonorrhea, which causes him to develop a medical interest in bacteria. This is also when he becomes addicted to ether, a habit that he will never completely lose.

Once Larch is a Boston doctor, he encounters the older sex worker again, this time as a patient. She is very ill from what he eventually realizes is a self-induced abortion. Later, he is approached by the daughter, now herself a sex worker. Wishing to avoid the fate of her mother, she demands that he give her an abortion, telling him that she is less than three months pregnant. When he demurs, she goes to a notorious local abortionist and dies from the operation.

Larch confronts the backstreet abortionist—an elderly woman known as Santa Claus—and the patients in her waiting room. He succeeds in taking one patient with him, a girl who was raped by her father. After performing a safe abortion on the girl, he acquires an underground reputation as a safe, affordable alternative to Santa Claus; at the same time, he is increasingly snubbed by his colleagues at the Boston hospital.  

Larch begins to find his position at the hospital claustrophobic and decides to move back to Portland. Once in Portland, he receives a letter from an anonymous woman, telling him that St. Cloud’s is in dire need of a doctor. He decides that his life’s work will be in St. Cloud’s and moves there to establish the orphanage and hospital. He leaves only to serve in World War I, during which time a pro-life doctor takes his place, and the number of unwanted babies born in the area greatly increases. The chapter ends with Homer Wells’ discovery of an aborted fetus in the hospital; he confronts Dr. Larch, who resolves to tell him everything.

Homer learns to be “of use” in the hospital and orphanage (7). In addition to performing small household chores for Dr. Larch, he also takes care of his fellow orphans. At night, he reads out loud to both the boys and the girls, who live in separate dormitories at night; Homer reads David Copperfield to the boys and Jane Eyre to the girls. He also becomes entangled with Melony, a tough but damaged orphan his age, who is angrier than he is about her orphaned predicament.

Melony takes him to an abandoned building beside the river; it is a former dormitory for mill workers. She shows him a pornographic photograph hanging over an abandoned bed. Melony tells Homer that if he is able to find her birth mother’s name in the hospital records, she will make herself sexually available to him. However, Dr. Larch makes a practice of destroying all records of birth parents, believing that this is what the parents would have wished. Homer discovers this when Dr. Larch catches him snooping in his office.

Dr. Larch also discovers the pornographic photograph, which Homer has hidden under his bed. He recognizes the woman in the photograph as the younger sex worker who was killed by the abortionist. He decides that Homer needs to be given more responsibilities and is ready to observe both the abortions and the baby deliveries in the hospital. Meanwhile, a sickly boy in the orphanage named Fuzzy Stone dies, and Homer and Dr. Larch resolve to keep his death a secret from the other orphans. They tell the boys that Fuzzy Stone has instead been adopted.